Gift Giving
by BC
Summary: They keep looking out for each other. 00Q. One-shot.


Summary: They keep looking out for each other. 00Q. One-shot.

Disclaimer: I don't own James Bond. I don't get paid for writing stories about him.

A/N: Wrote nineteen pages yesterday, entirely out of nowhere. Wrangled it into shape today. Not sure what the Hell, but let me know if you like it. Cross-posted on ffnet and AO3.

Aaand now I'm off to _Visionary_ and my original stuff. Maybe. Hopefully. Cheers!

Brynn

x

Gift Giving

x

James had some little qualms about bringing yet another gun back in pieces. At least he brought the pieces. Seeing Q bitter at the sight of it had never been funny or satisfying, and lately James had made it a point to not be present for the inevitable moment when Q's last desperate hope of reuniting with a creation of his was dashed.

Then Q had wised up to the fact that James provided no useful feedback whatsoever in his reports and put his interns up to bodily barricading the exit to prevent James from making a hasty retreat in the name of improving his inventions for field use. Ordinarily that wouldn't have stopped James, but Mallory took it out of his hide when he harmed the Department's interns, and he had Danielle assist.

"You could at least bring me a coffee while I wait for your boss," Bond said to the slightly more built man in the centre of the pile of geeks. Admittedly, the rest of the pile looked like it would fold on itself if that one man left – which was why James had singled him out.

"Don't ask me to bring you coffee!" the lab-rat protested loudly, shaking in his Nikes, gripping his Möbius strip pendant like a talisman capable of warding off evil. "I'll mess it up!"

"That does not fill me with confidence in the Q branch."

"I'm IT!" the man cried, pale and breathing hard, "I survive on green tea and weed! I don't know anything about bloody coffee!"

Something came flying at him and James barely raised his hand fast enough to catch it before it broke his nose. It was roughly spherical and green.

"It's an apple," the quartermaster explained, half-sitting on the edge of his desk and twirling a fountain pen in his right hand. The left, apparently, was the throwing one.

"So I assumed, from the look of it," James retorted.

"Your heart is like a time-bomb, double-oh-seven," Q informed him. "It'll keep on ticking until it blows, probably at the least convenient moment, as is wont for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a handy countdown display."

James didn't grin, although it took some effort. "And your solution to that is an apple?"

The quartermaster shrugged. "Not a solution. Merely a temporary patch. Follow me. I want to know why this one didn't survive." He glanced at the shards of an erstwhile weapon deposited in a shoebox on his desk, and he strode off through one of the side doors into a dimly lit corridor leading devil-knew-where.

"Sir," the bulkier intern spoke up in a tiny, scared voice, "if you don't want that apple, I'll be happy to take-"

"That apple," James said in his best theatrical menacing pose, "is _mine_." He glared and walked away. He wasn't that interested in finding out whether that man had pissed himself.

x

Q had looked forward to the 'class trip' – as he called it inside his head – to Glen Shee for weeks, but once they were here and started working, he quickly found he wasn't enjoying it half as much as he thought he would.

The work itself was exhausting, frustrating, but fun. His underlings were mostly happy, and those few who were cranky because of the weather had been relocated to the other projects. He usually wouldn't have resorted to such a move, based on something so personal, were it not for Bond.

Bond was antsy. When Bond was antsy, things blew up, (not always but) usually through his own doing. And while the point of this expedition was to blow things up, it was supposed to be happening in a controlled environment and provide measureable results.

Antsy Bond precluded controllable environment.

"He's like a force of nature," Kathy breathed, entranced by the spectacle in front of them.

"An elemental force," Brian agreed, wisely nodding his head. Just because he was closer to forty than to thirty, he thought he could take up the mantle of the wise old man for the Q branch.

In that he was mistaken, because Q routinely dealt with Bond, and Bond was markedly older than Brian. Brian didn't impress Q. That is, not any more than anyone Q chose for his team had to.

"He's like a barely coordinated bull in a china shop," Agnes said dryly. "With nitroglycerin."

"With plastic, actually," Thom corrected her.

"I thought nitroglycerin fit the china shop setting better," Agnes argued. "Which is the point of a metaphor."

Q sighed and stirred his inferior tea, tracking Bond's movement on the map and the winking out LED lights of the targets in his wake. Bond was ruthless and uncontrolled in his destruction, but also not nearly as efficient as he could be and… dare Q say it… distracted.

There was another boom, a much less distant one, and the entire room quaked. Some of Q's people yelled and cursed, others reflexively reached for the equipment to save it from shattering on the floor.

The whole room went dark.

Bond had somehow, against all projected disaster scenarios, managed to blow through the power lines. Q thought that deserved a reward, but first he had to get Bond out of this part of the country, before he went crazily homicidal, as opposed to his usual homicidal crazy.

"Force of nature!" one of the women yelled, while nearly everyone in the room – despite Q's express order to leave them in the lockers – brought out their mobile phones to shed some faint blue light on the situation. The standby generator kicked in and the lights turned back on. The map didn't.

Q absently picked up his phone when it started ringing.

"What just happened?!" Moneypenny demanded in a tight voice, obviously playing Chinese whispers for M.

"Nothing unexpected," Q replied blandly, gesturing the emergency medical team that burst in to calm down and stop spreading panic among unhurt scientists.

"The data transfer was cut, Q!" Moneypenny honest-to-God growled at him. "We thought you were attacked!"

"I _have_ told you I was having Bond test explosives, haven't I?" Q did his best to convey through mere tone that anyone who hadn't expected this – or worse – outcome didn't know the first thing about Bond's ilk and should be sent back into training.

"Controlled testing! You said _controlled_! As opposed to field testing-"

"There's a field. Well, a moor, but it's fairly dry in this season and I'm sure something could grow there."

"And you said it would keep Bond occupied while he healed the broken wrist, why did you let him-"

Q put the phone down, quickly dispensed instructions to his underlings and then raised it to his ear again.

"-the requisition forms on your desk. Hope you have fun with them. If you lost anything expensive, it's your funeral."

Q leaned back against the wall and watched as a figure covered in soot and dust climbed out of the dried-out bed of a creek. "Miss Moneypenny… Up from a certain level, you don't test an agent's survival skills against anything you may want to keep."

He hung up. He would review the results later; right now he needed to ship Bond away from Scotland, posthaste.

x

"I was a part of the cleaning crew," Q was informing Mallory as they entered the room James had picked as a quiet reading spot, "at my own request. I've been through Skyfall with the proverbial comb."

"Do you have a legitimate concern, Q?" Mallory cut through the rhetoric. He glanced around, but seemed to accept that the small mountains of the viscera of technology past weren't in fact convenient barriers between the world and an agent who had had just enough of it for the day (and might or might not have been taking a break on his run from Medical).

Boy, had he chosen the wrong place today.

Q finished setting up the projection and crossed the room to the optimal vantage point, some two yards off to Mallory's left. He situated himself and used the remote to start the replay.

"Did you know he had a sibling?"

James gritted his teeth. That was not a common knowledge, and he would see that it remained that way. He accepted that it wasn't realistic to expect to keep virtual files private from Q, and Mallory by virtue of the position he inherited had the _right_ to stick his nose into the agents' background, but that was as far as James would be willing to see that information spread.

"I am aware, yes," Mallory replied, tracing his lower lip with a finger while he watched the screen mounted on the far wall. "The operative word being 'had.' The child had died while still in nappies – if Bond was yet affected, it would have shown up on his psych results."

Q rubbed his hands together to stave off the chill, while the corner of his mouth twitched in an aborted sneer. "I've seen the way double-ohs do psych eval."

"They don personalities like masks," Mallory argued, although from his stance it was obvious that this was as far as he was willing to humour the quartermaster. "Someone like Bond may as well use his... ehm, _real_ name. There are no weaknesses tied to it. From a strategic point of view, knowing Bond's true identity is useless."

"That implies Bond will never, in the future, develop a personal life," Q pointed out.

Mallory grimaced, presumably recalling what he had read about James' actions over the course of his 'attachment' to Vesper. "Now that would be… undesirable."

The quartermaster said nothing. He kept his eyes on the playing record and occasionally scribbled down something into his notebook, but from that moment on he completely ignored Mallory's presence. He made a good show of it – it certainly did seem that his work demanded too much focus for him to continue the chit-chat – but Mallory wasn't fooled. His lips quirked and he inclined his head before he left the room.

"I don't need you to fight my battles," James said, startled and indignant in equal measures.

Q chuckled, unperturbed, like he had known of James' presence the entire time – he and his clever security systems. "Seriously? That is an absurd notion. I _design_ weapons."

"You don't fire them?" Bond mocked, watching disinterestedly as people died on the screen.

"Of course I do," Q retorted. "Over the course of development and testing. For use in dangerous situations, people like me have people like you."

If he was in the mood, James would have quibbled about the use of the word 'use' but he didn't feel up to it. He wouldn't let Q's roundabout defence unbalance him. In fact, he would utilise Q's vocabulary choices against him: "Then you should understand why weapons like I should not be allowed to form connections to human beings."

"And that's your second-to-last resort, double-oh-seven? Putting words in my mouth right before you have nothing left but to bluff your way out of a bind?"

"There's still seduction somewhere between that," Bond informed him, unexpectedly content with the knowledge that even a brooding Q was proving to be a competent partner for verbal sparring. "Why argue with Mallory?"

"I felt instinctively opposed to his moral stance and wanted to hear his reasoning for it. Needless to say, I have found it lacking. That woman-" he paused the record and pointed to one of the blurred figures, "-could take you in a straight fight and win."

"Hmm," James climbed out of his hidey hole, rewound the video a little bit and watched. Q was right. Of course he was right. He was wrong only once in a blue moon and usually James was right there with him. "There's still seduction."

Q unattractively snorted. "That doesn't work on everyone."

It would work on Q, and James almost told him so, but he knew that it would shatter the rare easy atmosphere that he had found himself enjoying, so he refrained. Also, he remembered that he had asked Q something and not received a satisfactory response – the little crook had weaseled his way out of it again.

"Why argue with Mallory?" he repeated.

Q sighed and hid his hands in the pockets of his hideous mustard-coloured cardigan. "I just want his number."

James had to smile at that. "You and your numbers."

"You don't complain when I hack your way out of traps," Q retorted.

James flicked an especially unruly strand of hair – which was to say something – out of the man's face and watched him sputter. It didn't last long. Q was becoming inundated to him.

Q shooed him away then, with a mock-stern reminder that a good third of Medical was still searching for him (the rest had given up after too many repeats of the same song and dance). James went, barely hearing the soft admission: "I don't believe you're not a person."

x

It was a chilly and damp English day, and Q was apathetically glaring at the panorama of London from the rooftop of the current MI-6 building.

Bond stole the cigarette right as Q was lifting it to his mouth again.

"That will kill you," he remarked, neither gleeful nor disapproving, like the secret agent he was. Then he took a drag, fitting his lips and leaving his DNA all over the mouthpiece.

"You're lucky I've seen your medical workup, you ardent collector of venereal diseases." Q took his cigarette back with quickness Bond obviously hadn't expected. Then again, he had a programmer's fingers. When he really got into it, his movements from the wrist down couldn't be tracked by human eye.

Bond watched him suck on the coffin nail, before his eyes roamed over the rest of Q – from his tennis shoes to the suit-pants, the shirt, the untied cardigan hanging off his shoulders and framing his unfortunate chicken-like ribcage. As a threat, Q would rank somewhere between 'ridiculous' and 'unnoticeable'... unless he had a computer at hand. Then he could be dangerous. Apparently, though, not only to enemies.

"I fucked up," Q admitted.

"Look at that – another sign of your humanity. They're just coming in droves today," Bond replied, not even bothering to make it into an innuendo.

Q felt strangely touched by that. It was akin to sympathy. Or affection.

"Is it bad?" Bond asked, possibly genuinely concerned.

Q took a deep, nicotine-filled breath, exhaled it over Bond's shoulder into the cloudy London afternoon. "On the scale of M chewing me up and spitting me out to a bullet to the back of the head, I estimate there is stomach acid in my immediate future."

"Hence the tobacco," Bond observed. He pulled the fag out of between Q's unresisting fingers and threw it away, where it landed in a puddle and ceased being a fire hazard. He stepped closer.

Q's palms seemed almost magnetically drawn to the bulges of biceps beneath the cotton of his shirt. He dragged his hands down to Bond's elbows and clutched. If Bond had pushed him back against the wall in that instance, Q might have let him do anything.

Instead, Bond just held on, steady and bracing and shielding Q from the world. It wasn't quite a hug, but more of a one than Q had received in a long time. It was warm and smelled of sweat and cologne, and he felt endorphins flooding him.

Bond tilted his head to the side and quietly, illicitly spoke: "You want more, you know where to find me. If fact, you're the one uniquely qualified to locate me at any given time."

Q wanted to tell him that he was looking for something else, but he knew himself well enough to realise that he just might take Bond up on the offer in the near future, and the man would be smug enough as was. There was no need to give him another reason for self-satisfaction. Q rubbed his knuckles up and down the side of Bond's neck, swiped the pad of his thumb over the edge of a jawbone, and took half a step back. The sensation in his chest was akin to _sympathy – or affection_. Improbable as it was, Q genuinely liked James Bond, whether as the double-oh-seven, or in a social context.

It wouldn't have been the case if Bond hadn't decided, in the wake of Mawdsley's death and the whole Silva debacle, to take Q under his wing. He was only half as ghoulish to Q as he was to other people, and the preferential treatment showed in that nowadays heads of divisions came to Q requesting that he mediate, or just straight-up using him as go-between. Q's annoyance was displayed though a range of unharmful but irritating computer viruses (with the exception of Joshua Derwent from Legal, but he had _asked_ for it), and well outweighed by the proto-hug he had just been enveloped in. Far from being a man of simple tastes, Q knew quality when he put his hands on it.

"I want to give you something," came out of Q's mouth before his mind caught up to it. His eyes narrowed, expressing his unhappiness with himself, but it was out there, so he would deal.

Bond raised an eyebrow. The crow's feet around the corner of his eye regrouped. "Now that is an unprecedented occurrence. Usually you bemoan having to leave your precious toys in my 'grubby paws'."

Q quirked a smile at the damn man. He hadn't thought it was possible to make him smile once he got into a mood. Of course, if anyone was capable of minor miracles, it was Bond. "Oh, but this is actually a toy. And actual toys _belong_ in the grubby hands of children. Or perpetual children, as the case may be."

Bond leaned in, wide-eyed in pretend wonder. "Have you built me a gadget?"

Q raised his finger – stinking of tar and apple – to his mouth. "Shh. Don't tell anyone. Then other agents would want their own, and I would never have the time to build anything for you again."

"We don't want anyone to cry 'preferential treatment,' do we?" Bond solemnly nodded, but his eyes were filled with mirth. "It will be our little secret."

"In that case," Q replied, and Bond let him sneak past him toward the roof door, "no one should see me giving it to you."

Q barely heard Bond's steps behind him, deftly navigating the puddle-littered ground without any splashing sounds. "I'm leaving for Ukraine in two hours."

"I am well aware." He would make sure that Bond would have his present before the take off.

x

James loitered about Eve's desk for a bit, contemplating strategy. Time constraints were severe, and the simplest route of annoying Eve into letting him do what he wanted was blocked off by Eve's absence. There was a set of high-heeled shoes hidden under the desk, so she was probably spending her lunch-break at the range – unless she was assassinating foreign mafia bosses, but James had heard that they tried to keep her away from sniper-grade rifles after her little Turkey mishap.

Either way, Eve was not there, and for anyone who was not her access to Mallory's office was either allowed, or more trouble than it was worth. James had helped himself by being rational and civil toward Mallory from the very beginning – the man wasn't quite naive enough to believe that he had a leash on 007, but he understood that unless he would really piss James off, James saw no reason to not let himself be led.

Tanner came up the stairs, paused under the archway for a moment, and sighed. "Please, tell me you're not plotting a quiet removal of our boss."

"Has he given me a reason?" James asked pragmatically, appropriated one of Eve's paperclips, and raised it in a somewhat menacing way.

Tanner cautiously turned his back to the wall and regarded the small piece of wire in James' hand. "None I'm aware of."

James nodded, satisfied. "When you see him-" with a tilt of his head he indicated Mallory's office, "-tell him that an unhappy quartermaster makes for irritable agents, would you?"

Tanner had to visibly exert himself to not grace James' childishness with any acknowledgment. Neither intimidated nor amused, the man nevertheless realised that James could have made a mess and refrained – at the very least the integrity of Mallory's office hadn't suffered during the making of James' point. James didn't imagine that his tantrum could shield Q from the consequences of his failures, but he was determined to provide what protection he could. Also, Mallory was hardly the type to shoot the messenger, so Tanner would be just fine. Q... well, James' actions had back-lashed on Q in the past, and he had not complained. He was practically inviting it.

"You believe it likely that threats will garner a positive response?" Tanner inquired, looking pointedly into the glass wall of Mallory's office to adjust his tie. The tie itself was an affront to anyone with any sartorial taste, therefore probably a gift, since Tanner did usually have a commendable sense of style.

"I was informed at my last soft-skills workshop that communication in the workplace is not only desirable but necessary," James retorted, and let the bent-up clip fall straight inside Eve's shoe. She _had_ shot him.

"Have a safe flight, double-oh-seven," Tanner wished him as James set out on his way to the airport. Whether he was being sarcastic was anyone's guess. James generated a lot of paperwork regardless of if he lived or died.

Half an hour later, as he sat in the backseat of a car driven by one of the not entirely interchangeable Department's chauffeurs, James' phone jingled with an incoming message.

It read simply: "Inner pocket."

James palpated the inside of his jacket and found one of the pockets distended with something shaped distinctly unlike a passport. There was a two-liner scribbled on the back of a receipt for Chinese take-out, a little monument to how ferociously Q despised post-it notes: "Exploding pen, James? How impractical. You do realise that you can't have a pen on you on a plane? On the other hand, flash drives are perfectly acceptable. PS: Yes, it does explode."

James considered that he might be a little bit in like. It wasn't a debilitating feeling, fortunately – he had had enough of those in the past and wasn't keen on repeating the experience – but it left him a bit less empty than usual. Like, suddenly, there was a set direction in the world. All roads led to Rome, but some led to Q, and James liked walking those, for a glimpse of a smile, for a witty retort... for an exploding flash drive covertly left in his pocket.

He pulled out his phone, texted: "I like your practicality." and wondered if Q would know he was paraphrasing a Tim Burton movie.

x

With eyes glued to the text on the pages in front of him, Q reached over to the coffee table, picked up his mug and took a sip of his tea.

"Were you a pickpocket before you became a genius?" Bond asked from the loggia door, which Q had thoughtfully unlocked for him when the security system alerted him to the agent skulking around the building.

"Perhaps in a past life, although I am compelled to point out that those two are not mutually exclusive." He set down both the book and the mug, one far enough away from each other to make any indeliberate contaminations unlikely. Then he leaned back and took a good, close look at the lunkhead invading his living room.

Bond appeared a little worse for wear, but not in dire need of medical attention, and not too frustrated with the outcomes of his mission. The mere fact that he came to Q instead of the Headquarters (disregarding for a moment the fact that he shouldn't have known where Q lived), suggested that he had done his job, tied the loose ends, and was looking for either some agreeable company, or somebody to playfully aggravate. If it was the latter case, Q could threaten him with a dearth of future exploding flash drives.

Bond smirked.

Q blinked at him blankly. Was he failing as a host by not inviting the man in (since when did he need more of an invitation than an unlocked door?) or not bidding him to take a seat? If he wanted to play the politeness game, he was welcome to come through the front door next time.

"It just occurred to me that to many people you might seem dangerous," Bond said, not trying very hard to suppress his laughter.

Admittedly, Q was wearing leisure wear (old denims and a t-shirt), probably looking all of sixteen, curled up on his sofa with a book and a mug with a picture of Bambi on it. But Q did have a phone in his pocket, and he could probably blow up two to three buildings within a minute if he really wanted to. Instead, he pulled out a tablet from under the sofa and checked on the alarm that should have stopped flashing once Bond was inside. "I'll take that as a compliment," he said absently.

"It was meant as one," Bond assured him, unmistakably zeroing in on the kitchen and descending on the fridge. He could try. Q had eaten the last of yesterday's take-out for lunch. It was about time to call for pizza.

Q had no qualms about feeding Bond. It was strange, this… friendship, for a lack of a better word, between them. It became strange probably the moment Q decided to expound on the Temeraire instead of introducing himself and trying to pretend he wasn't eccentric to one of the greatest living legends of the espionage field. Now it mutated to the point that Bond had tried to intimidate M by proxy into letting Q off the hook for messing up.

"You do things for me," Q muttered. There was a chance to rehash this and see if it was going anywhere, or if they should just let it mutate on and hope it wouldn't blow up in their faces.

"You started it," Bond retorted. He was even technically right, damn him.

Also, there were suspicious people moving around the back of the building. And there was a white van parked outside – no logo on it. This wasn't a delivery.

Q's mouth, on autopilot, said: "I shouldn't have hoped for an answer befitting someone older than four. I am not getting into this with you. You will drag me down to your level and beat me with experience."

"Rank has its privileges," Bond informed him. He came to tower over Q, having discovered and commandeered a muesli bar.

Q mentally replaced 'rank' with 'age' with the, maybe a little too solicitous, addendum of 'experience,' and found that he agreed. Meanwhile, one of the suspicious people outside came to the window of the van and said something to the driver, who was hidden behind tinted glass. "Oh."

"Oh what?" Bond demanded.

Q realised the thread of the conversation had run away from him. "Nothing."

"Now I'm intrigued," replied Bond the bloodhound. "As you knew I would be when you said 'oh'."

And yes, Q would have been, if he had paid more than four percent of attention to the secret agent. Which he hadn't, because he was rather preoccupied with what looked to be an armed robbery at best. And he wasn't than much of an optimist. "Like a dog with a bone, double-oh-seven. Obstinate."

"Tenacious," Bond argued _pro forma_, but he had realised that something was wrong and was now tracing Q's movements with that intensely determined expression.

"Single-minded."

"Never."

"If you weren't you might have noticed that you were followed here," Q retorted unkindly, but he was running the gambit of emotion all the way from curiosity to shock to anxiety to fear to the desire to flee.

"What?" Bond snapped. He crowded in.

"Look." Q stood up and handed Bond the tablet so he could watch the feed from one of the exterior cameras. "Friends of yours?"

"Friends of Graznovich." Bond scowled at the screen and tapped it with one finger over one of the figures dressed in black. "Olya."

"Assassin for hire?" Q forced through his suddenly dry throat. He could hear his heartbeat in his temples. He so wasn't meant to be in field. Give him a computer any day… in fact, give him a computer, period. He lunged across the sofa, almost breaking an ankle, but used enough to his own bouts of clumsiness to reflexively catch himself on the backrest. He dug around in a carton box and pulled out what used to be a hands-free, but was now suspended in a middle stage of Q's tinkering process. He put a bud into his right ear, fastened the mike and the reappropriated casing to his collar. He picked one of the hanging tentacle-like cables with the minijack and connected it to his phone.

Bond was watching him like he suspected Q had lost his mind and was wondering whether the grass on the other side was really as green as it seemed.

Then the window blew in.

x

James was well aware that Q was a genius, but rarely had the fact been so evident as in the moments when Q cobbled together a headset for himself, opened a line of communication and managed to connect to James' wig, too. It took him literally seconds.

James was the one to grab the man and pull him behind the sofa before he was hit by a shower of glass – or a bullet. Whatever they used to break the window, it had ripped through reinforced anti-shatter glass like tissue.

He hadn't counted on the idiot jumping right back out to grab his shirt from the sofa. James covered him by shooting two people off the loggia, and then dragged Q back in before the next armed person perforated him. Q pulled a phone out of the shirt, attached it to another tentacle hanging from his collar and speed-dialled.

"I was just about to call you in!" Tanner said through James' wig. "We need you at HQ. Bond's managed to piss off Graznovich's bounty hunter team and then fell off the grid. We need you to find him before they-"

Q pulled on the shirt and buttoned it up so that most of his artificial octopus wasn't showing. "Please, hold-"

"Q? This is an em-"

"I know, I know," Q put him off while James discarded his jacket (now he was regretting that he used the exploding flash drive at the first legitimate chance he had). "_Please, hold_."

"Q?! What the Hell is-"

Someone in the corridor peppered the entrance door with a round from an automatic.

James swallowed. On his own he would get out the hard way, but with an unarmed… practically civilian? Improbable.

"They found you!" Tanner gasped. "How did they find _you_?"

James saw the shadow's reflection in the kitchen window. "Get down!" he hissed, and instead of following his own advice he moved forward and shot around the door frame.

Q, in the meantime, recovered what turned out to be a Beretta he carried concealed, and competently double-tapped the next invader that landed on the loggia.

"Q?" Tanner demanded. "Are you shooting and holding the phone at the same time?"

"Of course not," the quartermaster replied, doing his job by offering James a spare gun together with about two pounds of ammunition in a messenger bag he unearthed from behind a row of books. "I'm not a killing machine, Bill. I need both hands to shoot with any degree of precision."

"You shouldn't have a wig. Taking tech from the HQ is punishable by-"

"Fire and brimstone, yes, we are all aware, Tanner," James cut in, deciding that the knowledge of his presence might be enough to stop the Chief of Staff praying for the quartermaster's life and start him on doing something constructive. Like sending reinforcements.

"That's why I got a commercially available hands-free from the store," Q explained, gesturing James to step onto a small, ugly rug, before he flipped a switch.

James wasn't sure what that did, but understood that stepping onto the floor was at best unwise. He glanced toward Q's collar. "Is that what this thing is?"

"I might have improved it a little in my overabundance of free time," Q snarked, working through his fear with speed that satisfied James enormously.

He harnessed that satisfaction and kicked the front door open. There were four men in the corridor. Three managed to get a shot off before they died. One of them hit. Only a graze.

Q came up behind him, took the safety off what at a glance appeared to be a canteen and let it roll down the staircase. Seconds later, light orange clouds rose in its wake.

"That'll keep them down for a while," Q stated, pulling the edge of the shirt over the lower half of his face. "Don't breathe it in."

"Move!" James ordered, wondering if he had a piece of cloth he could use as a makeshift mask, but gave it up as redundant. "And while you're at it, explain that stunt!"

"I don't like pain," Q griped as he followed down the stairs, with his own messenger bag over one shoulder, one hand buried in it ready to bring out something destructive, the other holding his Beretta.

"That's why you jumped into the direct line of fire."

They stopped on the first floor, listening for echoes of footsteps or loud breathing or anything that could betray the position of the other attackers. There had been at least nine of them. They had killed five.

"Yes," Q whispered after the silence became deafening. "Because I needed a phone, and to get that phone, I had to break cover. Because if I didn't get that phone, they might have taken me and tortured me and I don't like pain."

The whisper was enough to bring the enemies out of hiding.

x

Q was contemplating mortality. Specifically his.

It was a topic he intensely disliked and yet one he revisited with a certain regularity. He had nearly died several times over the course of his life, a few of those violently. He had been stabbed when he was fourteen, and had almost bled out before he managed to call himself an ambulance.

He had learned that he had to save himself.

At a less auspicious time in his late teens, he had been shot for the first time, and learnt that another way of saving himself was making himself too precious to be killed.

In this very instance, James Bond frightened him. It wasn't because Q had watched him kill people – Q had done that many times in the past, and Q had killed people himself. Even today, if he had hit that one right, which wasn't certain with how badly he had been shaking.

Speaking of, he was still shaking. Coming down from the adrenaline rush was a bitch – forgive his French.

A hand fell on his shoulder, making him flinch.

"Are you having a panic attack?" Bond asked.

When Q didn't immediately reply, the secret agent extraordinaire crouched down and forcefully tilted his head up.

"Get your hand off me!" Q hissed. "If you want in my pants, at least buy me a dinner first." It was automatic. He didn't mean it. He didn't want… well, that was a lie, but he wasn't throwing himself at Bond. He wasn't even taking him up on his offer. Not now. Not like this.

Bond chuckled. "You would be high maintenance."

Q exhaled and counted to three before he allowed himself to inhale again. He repeated the process six times before he felt like he could think through the molasses that seemed to fill his cranial cavity.

"You've been shot," he observed.

Bond shook his head. "Barely a scratch."

"I've seen what you consider barely a scratch," Q pointed out.

"Three stitches," Bond reassured him. "I'll even take off the bandage if you need to see it with your own-"

"Keep your bandages on, double-oh-seven!" Q commanded, swallowing down the hysterical laughter that threatened to bubble up his throat. He wasn't built for this. He couldn't do it – couldn't face guns and people wielding them. He was a theoretician. A strategist. He was a thinker and a hacker, and he needed Bond to be the impenetrable barrier between him and the bullets. "Fuck it, I'm a coward…"

Bond sank down on the hospital bed next to Q so hard that the frame rattled – he fell rather than sat, and for a moment it showed how genuinely exhausted he was, after his mission and the shit-storm he had brought to Q's flat and – was that guilt? It was.

How predictable.

"You're ridiculous," Q said, hoping it would come out a lot more offensive than it did.

Bond responded by putting an arm around his shoulders. Ridiculous.

"I told you she could take you."

"In a straight fight," Bond added, once again being right, damn him.

"It's so conceited of you to believe you're the best in the world." Q secretly feared that this belief was exactly what would get Bond killed one of these days. Objectively, he was getting slower and weaker. He did his best to hide it, and he mostly succeeded, but he _was_ getting older and there _was_ a new generation closing in on him, biting at his ankles…

It would have been so much easier if Q hadn't cared.

"She was better than me," Bond admitted. It looked like pronouncing the words hurt him.

Q's body decided it was going to let his head fall onto Bond's broad, warm shoulder. He slid into something like a hug again – a shoulder under his cheek, an arm around him, holding him steady in this suddenly spinning world consisting presently of MI-6 Medical.

"And she's still dead," Q pointed out in an abhorrently plaintive tone. She was dead, dead like Bond could be any day of the week, dead like Q had almost ended up today.

"Because you were smarter than she expected."

Q glanced up. Bond's eyes were trained on the floor; his hand absently traced Q's hipbone. This was becoming absurd.

Before he had a chance to say something incriminating, Bond let go of him and moved off to leave acceptable two feet of space between them. M entered, and in his wake Bill and Danielle and Joshua Derwent, the sight of whom made Q tense again, washing away the pleasant warmth of another Bond-provided proto-hug.

"Gentlemen," M spoke, "I hear you have electrocuted Olya Zhelazna to death."

x

"Bond," a familiar voice spoke as soon as James picked up.

He had been expecting a call from Britain, but it was supposed to have come either from Q, or from one of his faithful followers.

"Micromanaging the Q branch?" James inquired. "Are you even qualified for that?"

"No to both your questions," Mallory admitted easily, confident enough in his skills that he didn't sound at all cowed by the monumental intellects of the people working technically under him (they weren't, because they were Q's, but that line was fine and there was no reason to mention it as of yet). "You're coming back today. Leave the mission to Ziegler; it's his turf anyway."

Bond had little qualms about abandoning the piddling game at organised crime the Department had sent him to clean up. It was no challenge and there was only so much boozing on the Crown's money he could do before the tap would run dry. He knew he had been sent on this milk-run to keep him from re-breaking his damn arm, and that made it even worse.

"Has something turned up?"

Mallory released a tense breath that rattled through the line and crackled in James' ear. "I have put the quartermaster on administrative leave after he had not gone off the clock for more than two days straight again, and now I have a revolt on my hands."

The corners of James' mouth twitched upwards.

"They Q branch are collectively boycotting half of their paperwork and claim that in the absence of their boss they will only negotiate with you."

James considered alerting Mallory to the fact that this was unquestionably his own purview, and that recalling a field agent from an active mission to play nanny was not the way competent managers managed, but he was more civilised than that and, also, for several reasons, he was tired of the German hotel.

"Tell the ginger one to book me on the next flight to Heathrow," James said and hung up.

x

There was uproar about a member of the MI-6 legal team being accused of premeditated murder.

Q was honestly surprised to hear it was Derwent.

He was, just as honestly, unsurprised when Derwent was found decidedly not guilty and released from custody about a week later.

Derwent took a week of sick-leave and came back to work, pale, sporting a dark expression and darting suspicious looks at anyone who came within sight, as though he was waiting who would be the next to falsely accuse him.

None of that would have touched Q's life at all, were it not for the air of self-satisfaction surrounding the trio of Kathy, Brian and Thom on a rainy Monday morning. It was a miserable time, and they were gearing up for an unhappy cleaning-out mission in South Africa that to Q felt distinctly like a small-scale genocide via a single deployed agent (yes, it was double-oh-seven, and no, his feelings weren't personal – well, they were, but he would have had similar feelings even if it hadn't been personal).

"Told you he was an elemental force," whispered Brian.

"You said a force of nature," Kathy objected. "_I_ said elemental force."

Thom rolled his eyes at them, but continued smiling as though he knew something no one else did, which was enough of a tip off for Q.

Half an hour later, he and Bond cornered one another in the Executive branch's downstairs bathroom. Q sulkily watched Bond wash his hands and then waste an armful of paper towels pretending to dry them.

"It was you," Q accused.

"Hm?" Bond looked up from the graveyard on paper towels in the bin. "What was?"

Q wouldn't be derailed by a vulgar pretense of innocence. "Derwent. It was you."

"Lies and slander," Bond non-replied. It could have been a retort or an excuse or his reasoning for setting up a man to be imprisoned for a serious crime.

Q jabbed his finger into Bond's expansive chest. "I don't need you to fight my battles."

Bond raised an eyebrow.

Q forced down a sigh. "Alright, some of them… perhaps. But not this one. He attacked where he perceived a weakness – my past, the path I almost took. But I'm here, and less vulnerable for having faced that and turned away."

"He said-"

"I know what he said. I was there." Words about counter-intelligence and prostitution and allegations as to which one Q was better suited for. "And he is entitled to his opinion, but voicing it does little except create enemies for him, and he might just discover that after his colleagues decide that he has outstayed his welcome here, there will be no other place waiting to welcome him."

Bond's blank expression didn't quite crack, but his posture shifted and suddenly Q was pinned under an uncompromising stare. "What did you do?" Like he had the moral high-ground to judge anything Q could have done.

Could have, but hadn't. "I?" He hadn't needed to exert himself. That was the point. That was what being Q meant. "I did nothing, _James_. Suppose that I kept a very close eye on the MI-6 servers-"

James' eyes filled with mirth, since he knew roughly how close an eye on the servers Q kept.

"-I might have found out to what lengths my dedicated disciples went to avenge my honour." Q had made himself indispensable, precious, deserving of protection. He had armies that would come to his defense if he needed them – everything was just a few clicks away. Still, there was a different kind of satisfaction in having James Bond voluntarily take on the mantle of a personal hero. "I don't need you to fight my battles, James. I may, however, occasionally like it."

Bond apparently understood, because he shackled Q's wrist in a circle of his fingers and asked: "Let me buy you dinner?"

x

"What happened?"

"You re-broke your arm, double-oh-seven," replied Q's voice. The non-playful use of James' designation in combination with the unmistakable scent of the Medical confirmed for James that the quartermaster was beyond unhappy with him. Perhaps more something along the lines of _livid_.

"That doesn't cause unconsciousness," James rasped, closing his eyes in the vain hope that the pounding headache might abate.

"It does when you're holding onto a ledge thirty feet above the street. You were lucky to fall onto a trash heap."

That wasn't the way James pictured luck. "Lucky would have been my bones remaining intact," he griped.

"Then drink some milk with your alcohol," Q retorted sharply. "Better yet, _instead_ of your alcohol. If you die because your liver gives out, I'll make sure history will remember you for that."

"History will not remember me," James protested, briefly startled when he felt fingers touching his wrist and then quickly trapped the hand before Q could get away. He had never had someone come and visit him in Medical, unless they wanted his report, _pronto_. Or to finish him off. Occasionally both at once. "That's the point."

"I will make sure you will be remembered. _The great lush that drank himself to death. Just like that divorced lawyer who jumped off that bridge, you know that one, what was his name_-"

"Oh, shut up."

"Eloquent," Q bit off.

Silence fell on them, thick and heavy, on the background of distant noise of conversations, people moving around and machines humming and beeping. The hand in James' became slightly moist with sweat, and lay limply in his grasp.

Another hand hovered over James' face for a few seconds, before the thumb-pad stroked a single line down his cheek, almost as if it was drawing the path of a tear from the corner of his eye to his chin.

"You were scared," James realised with sudden clarity. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of it before – or, well, he did. He hadn't had anyone who cared like that for too long a time to recall the details of it. "That is not smart."

"I am smart," Q objected. "And I brought you an apple, because they gave you antibiotics, and I know where you hide your alcohol. By which I mean, you don't have alcohol hidden in Medical anymore. Enjoy your apple, James."

He pulled his hand away then, clasping lightly in a farewell when James reached out for him, unwilling to let him go. He left anyway, already on the phone with another deployed agent as he exited the ward.

x

Q jumped off the bus, earning a few askance looks and a rather impolite epithet from the people descending upon the door, so eager to board that they wouldn't allow the passengers to exit first. Admittedly, the displeasure had probably more to do with his appearance than his tendency to use his pointy elbows in making a way through the crowd.

Loose, worn denims and a black sweater, especially with the hood pulled on, had a distinct propensity to inspire aversion, especially in the older generations and the richer classes.

"The youth of today," spat a woman who couldn't have been much older than Q himself.

Q stuck a cigarette between his teeth and struck a match to light it.

By the time he reached home, by-passing the guards Bond had hand-picked (thinking he was being covert), there was nothing but the filter left, so he crushed its end against the white-painted wall and deposited it in his pocket. No need to litter sensitive information all over London pavements.

His flat was already occupied, and Q grimaced at the low air-conditioned temperature as he toed off his sneakers. He sneezed.

Bond appeared in a doorway, followed by the scent of grilled chicken. "Behold, a living proof that an apple a day does _not_ keep the doctor away."

"Says the lush who stacks bottles of Laphroaig between my tea tins," Q retorted and faux-shivered in his hoodie.

"That cabinet is a den of false advertising," Bond complained, returning to the kitchen to presumably check on his latest cooking attempt (if it went like the others, it was bound to be a vast success, despite the plaster enveloping his arm from knuckles almost to shoulder). "It says 'gunpowder' on the lid, and there're only dry leaves inside."

"You go snooping through my things as if you were deprived of your own. I know how many figures you make."

"Exactly," Bond reappeared behind Q, shadowing him into the bedroom – the only bedroom in a one-bedroom flat, which was itself bigger than what Q could be bothered to maintain.

Q sat on the side of the bed, discarded his socks and wriggled his long, amphibian-like toes to stretch them.

Bond leaned down to perfunctorily kiss him, before he scowled at Q for the manner in which he treated his clothes and moved the socks to the hamper where they belonged. Q still wasn't sure how the hamper had made its way into his flat, but he did have a suspicion regarding the double-oh-perpetrator.

Said suspicious man glanced at Q from under thin, blond eyelashes. "I can have as many things as I want, and none of them have any value."

Q found himself involuntarily shut up. Bond might have said it for the effect, but he didn't seem to have realised that anything was wrong with what he just professed to – that things were just things unless they belonged to Q, and it was belonging to Q that made them valuable.

The silence didn't last long; Q's next sneeze shattered it quite thoroughly.

"If you're sick, don't breathe on me," Bond warned. "It's bad enough I am lame."

"That's your death wish showing." But it wasn't. Q had in his head a statistic of Bond's injuries, their severity and frequency and cause, and the progression was alarming.

"You're the one courting lung disease," Bond informed him, as though Q was sneezing due to pulmonary cancer rather than the refrigeration of his living space.

"I had to pick my vice, and alcohol messes with coding. I don't have the patience to check everything I write for typos."

"There is something to be said for the clarity of nicotine," Bond agreed. "The taste, however, is horrible." With his good hand he indulgently traced patterns over Q's shoulder, pushing and pulling at the hoodie.

Q took it off, together with the t-shirt he was wearing underneath, and lay down. He planted his face into the pillow and remained that way until he really had to breathe, whereupon he groaned and turned his head to the side. He slid a hand under the pillow, bunching it up.

His hair was tickling his neck. It was probably time for a haircut.

He had done it himself in the past, but the looks people gave him for a month afterwards were in sum more of an annoyance than a visit to a barber. Or James could… uh, no. No, he couldn't. Letting assassins close to his vital organs with sharp instruments was James' kink, not Q's.

He let the sixty-hour day slip away from him and sank into oblivion, while the gentle, warm touch contrasting with the chilly air anchored him. He didn't remember signing up for cohabitation, but it did take away the stress of trying to pass as a socialised human being, and made for much better, rarely medicated sleep.

x

James learnt mostly by watching other people make mistakes and taking care to not repeat them. Unfortunately, there was no such ready manual when it came to Q.

Q mostly got along with everyone – everyone whom he deemed polite enough and intelligent enough to be worthy of the _homo sapiens_ designation. He met few of the other kinds, due to the nature of his job.

One such person was Joshua Derwent, an ex-lawyer and ex-husband and, apparently, more recently an alcoholic. Q's ruthless side came out rarely outside of inventing, but James found it attractive and sought to nurture it. In the days following the massacre near Johannesburg, and in the weeks following Q's moving to a different flat, and in the months following Mallory's realisation that James could hurt even him if he really tried, which made James a legitimate threat, Q remained unknown and unknowable. James invented new ways of hewing at the walls Q had build around himself, and every tiny splinter of information was a victory in and of itself.

"You're down to seventy-three percent, double-oh-seven," the technician spoke into the microphone, disturbing James' concentration and causing the next shot to veer off a little to the left. That never would have happened to him ten years ago.

Seventy-something percent result never would have happened to him either. Damn, but Eve had messed him up (he said Eve, but Eve and her shitty aim were his excuse for why he wasn't thirty anymore).

"Boss wants you to know," the technician continued, her voice wavering indecisively, "that if you don't get it up above seventy-five, he's sending you out with an automatic."

James suppressed a shudder. Giving him an automatic would be like calling him a bad shot. They hadn't even given a machine gun to Eve. He brought the Glock up and, after a short hesitation, gripped it in both hands. Better two-handed shooting than sub-par results.

He realised, far too late, that Q had a terrifying amount of control over him. He didn't use it. Or, at least, James didn't notice Q using it. He could have, however, and it had made James consider resigning from the Service for the second time in his life – although the reasoning was far different. He was beginning to feel keenly that he wasn't strong enough, fast enough to avoid becoming compromised. Q had become his safety net, and that in itself was compromising.

Once his clip was empty, the red light overhead turned off and the target with the generic silhouette painted on moved closer for him to inspect his spread. He didn't bother. The technician would tell him what he needed to know.

"Eighty-one point two, double-oh-seven," the voice came in, happy. "Congratulations."

Congratulations on not earning his retirement badge yet, James thought bitterly. And his – his _keeper_ – because he couldn't think of a fitting description was… how old? James had never managed to found out. Not exactly. No name, no age, no previous affiliation. By the time it had occurred to him that Joshua Derwent might have known something, the man had jumped off a bridge, wasted off his mind. Another dead end. Literally.

He heard footsteps behind him when he pulled off the muffs. Familiar footsteps. "Why are you here?" he demanded, accusatory.

The footsteps faltered. There was a shuffle, accompanied with the rustle of clothing. "I brought you your coat. I thought we could sneak out the back and take your Vanquish for a spin."

The DB5 was irreparable, but Q had found a different vintage car that he had restored – for fun – and gifted to James.

"Why me?" he had to ask.

Q laughed – it was not a mocking laughter, but there was an edge to it. "Who else, James? Give me a name. In fact, I dare you to give me one."

James honestly couldn't. People who were on Q's level mentally were mostly their enemies, occasionally reluctant allies and rarely either too old for him (like James himself, but he was perpetually struggling to defy his age) or logistically unavailable. The men and women in the Q branch worshipped the ground he walked on, but Q was not interested in keeping an acolyte – or acolytes. He wanted…

James finally turned around, put his arms around Q and pulled him against his body. He was a little too forceful, but Q didn't mind. He settled his chin on James' shoulder and closed his eyes. He smelled like tea and apples and tar.

The light in the observation room went out. The technician left to give them privacy – against all regulations, and confirming James' suspicions of just how devoted the lab rats were to their Pied Piper.

"How do you feel about civil partnership?" James asked after a while. He wasn't committing to anything, only fishing. Just maybe, he wanted to leave behind something tangible when he finally gave up the ghost, for the one person who strove and succeeded to become tangible to him.

"I think it doesn't offer nearly as many rights as it should," Q replied philosophically and without providing an answer.

"Would you marry me?"

He felt the bony shoulders under his arm shrug. "That depends. What sort of life-insurance do you have?"

"That is a joke… right?"

"Hmm…?"

"The Crown will pay for cremation, if I have the poor taste to leave behind a body. That's the extent of it." He was perhaps trivialising the humbug, but he had no estate worth a damn (beside Skyfall, but he didn't give a broken penny about Skyfall) and after how the Department had dealt with Mawdsley, he wasn't expecting much. He had just never anticipated that he might leave behind someone whose opinion would matter to him.

"You don't actually have enough legal identity to marry anyone, so it's all academic," Q pointed out.

He was right. Of course he was.

Q's lips touched the skin of his neck and James briefly tightened his arms.

"I've got something for you," the man said quietly. He glanced up, eyes lighting up with unholy glee.

"What kind of something?" James inquired, a little wiser to the ways of the quartermaster now than he had been in the past.

Q tilted his head back and grinned. "An exploding something, double-oh-seven. Something _just yours_."

x

It was the jacket, Q was sure.

It was a comfy jacket, and most days he couldn't give two fucks about what he wore, except that it had to be warm enough (he had poor circulation, nothing to be done about it) and comfortable enough to exist in for dozens of hours on end. Why M and Bill and Diane refused to accept his life philosophy of the day ending when his energy ran out, he would never understand.

After all, they ate up Bond's philosophy of strength running out when he'd cease breathing easily enough.

Anyway, it was most likely due to the jacket that he was offered crack by a shady, smelly character, crouching in the entrance of a foreclosed eatery vainly hoping that the dilapidated wall would protect him from the wind that had been picking up since the sunset.

Q felt like his past had reared up and smacked him in the face, except that this time he had his warm jacket, his awareness of how radically his mental capacity was reduced by psychotropics, and his bodyguard.

"Step away from the gentleman," a low, threatening voice sounded from the corner of the building – from where stood a man with stormy eyes and a walking stick of Q's own design (yes, it _could_ explode, but that was not its main feature).

"I thought it was Roger's shift tonight," Q spoke, taking in details of the dealer's appearance. Someone was doing a shoddy job, like any potential customer wouldn't figure out that there was a police station a block away.

Oh, well, if they wouldn't figure it out, they deserved to be caught.

"He had reservations for the Skyline," Bond said. "A date with… what's her name, the ginger one."

"Kathy," Q supplied.

Bond shrugged, disinterested. "Are you ready to go?" He gave the rancid man a meaningful stare and offered his elbow to Q, as though Q was a damsel to be promenaded around the night city.

"Good luck, detective," Q said. "Don't overdo it – it's supposed to drop below zero tonight."

Bond fell into step with him. It was cold, but Bond liked cold, so he didn't insist on calling a cab or taking the tube.

"You're early," Q remarked after a while of walking. He had intended to microwave a dinner and maybe indulge in a couple of illicit glasses of wine that Bond would not find out about – but this was better.

"I was not followed," Bond insisted. That one time had done a number on him, and even though Q had long since forgiven him and never brought it up, it still weighed on his conscience. "No one was left to follow me."

They entered a square and Bond steered them toward a stall decorated with colourful lights. He fished a wad of bills out of his pocket and put two on the counter, monstrously overpaying. In return he accepted a plastic glass of mulled wine for himself and Q each. He handed Q's over and refused the vendor's change with a grunt.

They went down the next street at a steady pace, occasionally sipping their beverages, and Q was glad for the fingerless gloves he had resorted to for the long hours of typing in a vast and poorly heated lab.

He felt James' eyes on him and turned to face him. The wind had painted the man's cheeks rosy, giving him the appearance of health, but his eyes were shuttered.

"What's wrong?" he asked, unsure whether his curiosity would be welcome.

James deliberated. Then he stuck his left hand into his pocket and replied: "I missed Christmas – and you have no idea how absurd that statement sounds out loud. I haven't had a chance to…"

…to pick up a present, Q filled in inside his head. To be honest, that hadn't actually occurred to him at the time. Unless he had missed a night, today was the twenty-ninth of December, a perfectly ordinary day, except that James was indulging Q by traipsing across the city with him and buying him mulled wine (almost like he knew Q's plans for tonight, the nosy bastard).

Q raised his plastic glass in a toast. He couldn't think of anything to say.

Bond couldn't either. They touched the receptacles together, one half-full, the other half-empty, both containing roughly the same amount of drink.

The corners of James' lips curved upwards.


End file.
